Album: Every Song is a Good Song
Artist: Car Made of Glass
Label: Montgomery Street Records
Catalogue no: lola021
Tracklist:
1. Running
on a Discontinuous Circuit
2. The
Road
3. Infant
Mind
4. Experiments
in Bluetooth Technology
5. Wind
Brushes C
Judging by this, Fortuna,
California five-piece Car Made of Glass have a very simple philosophy: if an
object, process, or action can make a sound, it can be used to make music with.
That idea is evidenced on this latest recording, listing as it does things like
amplified glass, raw meat in scalding pan, light-switches, and straw and water,
amongst other inventive uses of unusual instrumentation. And yes, this is
another one of those exploratory journeys I sometimes make to the margins of
the margins of the musical non-mainstream, as I believe everyone needs to stray
outside their comfort zones on occasions.
You’ve probably guessed
that this is a highly experimental suite of compositions, and you’d be right. Right
from the off randomly bouncing beads of glass tinkle in scattershot fashion,
crackling and reverberating like tiny little explosions, minute fireworks
detonating into multitudinous colours and hues in a weeping, mournful sky. ‘The
Road’ starts off sparklingly with individually-strummed acoustic guitar chords
against a backdrop of dustiness, a quiet hot summer day on some long, lonely
desert road, heat shimmer rising off the black-top, and the radio struggling to
find a station. Static and voices, slide guitar, and the slow, ticking
crackling of heat expansion underscore the vast empty spaces of this landscape,
sweltering under a merciless sun. Then, finally, the colours leech out, and
everything burns away into a blanket of white.
‘Infant Mind’ is a
strange concoction, a splattering noisiness backing up a solo saxophone (I
normally hate this instrument, but here it adds a wonderfully ghostly presence
to the track) accompanied by piano tinkling and jazz drums. A late summer
evening, the heat of the day cooling off, drinks under the stars, and
flirtatious strangers. This has minute echoes of The Caretaker about it:
perhaps a fractured memory of an evening long ago, when life was sweet and
easy, things were perhaps simpler, and new possibilities seemed endless.
The next track,
‘Experiments in Bluetooth Technology’, is the loosest and most freeform of all
the pieces on here, and does exactly what it says on the tin (to coin a
phrase). Staccato blasts of random snippets of electronics, noise, music, and voices
splash, crash, and dash, garnished with slabs of white noise, bleeps, squeaks,
bells, rattlings, and all manner bits and bobs. It’s that radio still
struggling to find a station with a clear and strong enough signal. It’s also
alien in some inexplicable way, a glimpse of a world or environment that’s
unfamiliar to most of us.
Distant creakings and
scratchings open ‘Wind Brushes C’, sounds heard while one is half-asleep and
still dreaming, a disorientating, confusing hypnogogic vision inspired by the
real world. It’s infused with high summer heat and dust, and the skittering and
chattering of chitin-shelled creatures scuttling around unseen in subterranean
tunnels, their business unfathomable and secretive. More than that, the space
is unending from horizon to horizon, with little to break up the monotony. The
colours here are muted and sandy, with only the blue bowl above providing any
distraction for the eye.
What this collection does
particularly well is spark off images, painting vistas and panoramas with
minute detail and their associated atmospheres. It focuses on the small within
the large: we experience it on the human level, and yet it still tells us that
we’re standing in an inhumanly flat and endless prospect, reducing us to
nothing more than an insignificant mote. It’s humbling and terrifying: when
faced with seemingly limitless horizons we retreat into ourselves, defocusing
and magnifying what’s directly in front of us or on the ground.
It’s a distinctly
accessible album – it’s not out and out avant-garde thrashings and bashings, or
difficult for difficulty’s sake. While it’s not musical in the sense of having
recognisable tunes or melody either, it is
very musical in that it elicits moods and feelings, and inspires the
imagination. I will definitely be listening to this one again – there’s just
something sparkling winding its way through the veins of invention here, allied
to a truthfulness and clarity, all facets that appeal to me.
Available as a limited
(50 copies) CDr from either of these links:
Psymon Marshall 2019.
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